Sourced and curated.

Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing, Beloved from pole to pole!

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 3.8

Nor dim nor red, like God's own head, The glorious Sun uprist.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 3.8

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide wide sea!

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 3.8

1834

★ 3.8

Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed The lighthouse top I see? Is this the hill? Is this the kirk? Is this mine one countree?

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 3.7

He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast. He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 3.7

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 3.7

Till clombe above the eastern bar The horned Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 3.7

The moving Moon went up the sky, And no where did abide; Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside-

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 3.7

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride that apes humility.

1799

★ 3.7

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

1816

★ 3.7

Friendship is a sheltering tree.

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

1828

★ 3.7

1834

★ 3.7

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.

1799

★ 3.6

Shakespeare...is of no age-nor, I may add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic mind.

1817

★ 3.6

If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found the flower in his hand when he awoke-Aye! and what then?

1834

★ 3.6

Personal journal

He who begins by loving Christianity, better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

1816

★ 3.5

The happiness of life, on the contrary, is made up of minute fractions-the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss, a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment in the disguise of playful raillery, and the countless other infinitesimals of pleasurable thought and genial feeling.

1825

★ 3.5

The Improvisatore · 1828

★ 3.5

Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 2.1

The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 2.1

The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared, Merrily did we drop Below the kirk, below the hill, Below the lighthouse top.

Prose = words in their best order;-poetry = the best words in the best order.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 2.0

1834

★ 2.0

Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner · 1798

★ 1.9

Autobiography and memoir

Bygone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind, like breezes blown from the spice-islands of Youth and Hope-those twin realities of this phantom world!

1817

★ 1.9

Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense, at all events; just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house, at least.

1834

★ 1.9

The Good consists in the congruity of a thing with the laws of the reason and the nature of the will, and in its fitness to determine the latter to actualize the former: and it is always discursive. The Beautiful arises from the perceived harmony of an object, whether sight or sound, with the inborn and constitutive rules of the judgment and imagination: and it is always intuitive.

1834

★ 1.9

You may depend upon it, that a slight contrast of character is very material to happiness in marriage.

1814

★ 1.9

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

1834

★ 1.9

Letter

In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dim-glimmering through the dewy window-pane, I seem rather to be seeking, as it were asking for, a symbolical language for something within me that already and for ever exists, than observing anything new.

1826

★ 1.2

Essay